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Sludge control foreperson monitors operations at the San Jose-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility in San Jose, Calif., Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016. During the upcoming Super Bowl, much more wastewater will be rushing through during the big-game as bathroom-flushing habits aggregate and spike at halftime, both at Levi's Stadium and the greater South Bay. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

Seagulls look for food in the head works at the San Jose-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility in San Jose, Calif., Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016. During the upcoming Super Bowl, much more wastewater will be rushing through during the big-game as bathroom-flushing habits aggregate and spike at halftime, both at Levi's Stadium and the greater South Bay. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

SAN JOSE — As South Bay residents and visitors watch the big game ﻿Sunday and take in the intermission performance by Coldplay, a half-mile from Levi’s Stadium will be a squad of people prepping for their own halftime show, albeit a couple hours after the final whistle.

These are the unsung heroes who put the “bowl” in Super Bowl.

The workers at the region’s sewage treatment plant — also known as the San José-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility — have the odorous responsibility of tackling the spike in wastewater surging through the facility from the staggering number of near-simultaneous mid-game toilet flushes from many among the 70,000 or so Levi’s attendees, on top of the million-plus area TV viewers hustling to relieve themselves and avoid missing any action.

“Nobody knows about us when we do our job right,” said Kerrie Romanow, director of environmental services for the City of San Jose, which operates the plant. “But it’s exciting. It’s the Super Bowl, a half-mile away.”

Indeed, standing on top of one of the 40-foot-high digester silos — where anaerobic bacteria break down assorted sludge, producing methane that provides 70 percent of the plant’s power needs — the stadium is in clear line of sight across Highway 237.

The silo is part of an array of processes to purify wastewater coming from 17,000 sewer connections and 300 miles of interconnected pipes serving 1.6 million customers in San Jose, Santa Clara and a half-dozen other Silicon Valley cities. The plant’s daily peak flow rate is 110 million gallons of wastewater, or enough to fill downtown San Jose’s SAP Center, site of the Super Bowl media day and affectionately known as the Shark Tank.

From the pregame show onward, the plant anticipates a potential peak flow rate of 167 million gallons, or more than one-and-a-half Shark Tanks worth of effluence generated at the start of the game alone, and double the average for a regular Sunday. The facility will literally be up to its eyeballs: That’s also 13 million more gallons than the average of past Super Bowl Sundays, without an on-site game, right at the ceiling of the facility’s normal operating capacity.

So for the duration of the game Sunday, the equivalent of more than eight Shark Tanks full of wastewater will be heading slowly but surely toward the treatment center that sits on 2,600 acres in the northernmost reaches of San Jose.

“Looking at the numbers, it’s not just another day,” said plant manager Joanna De Sa, who is also a deputy director of environmental services.

Because it takes minutes, even hours for the community’s contributions to travel from toilet to treatment, the plant’s Super Bowl day crew will be busy long after the game is over.

With its relatively short distance away, Levi’s Stadium has one of the shortest routes between flush and when the, ahem, waste, hits the fan, or the front line of treatment, clocking in at 30 minutes. Comparatively, a flush from the Almaden Valley in San Jose, about 20 miles away, takes between two and three hours to let gravity run it course and deliver it to treatment.

Once wastewater gets to the plant’s entry point known as the headworks, huge mechanical arms move rotating bars that pull out solids like the baby wipes and other disposables that have been a bane to treatment plants the region over. It’s skimmed for other solids, anything from grease and oils to other biological matter, much of which forms a sludge to be broken down by bacteria and bugs in the aforementioned digesters. The water is then aerated, clarified and filtered in a succession of gigantic tanks to ultimately remove 99 percent of impurities. The intensive process makes San Jose home to the state’s largest tertiary treatment plant.

After 12 to 14 hours, about 90 percent of the treated wastewater goes into the bay, with the rest used as recycled water for irrigation, industrial use, and, to complete a circle of life of sorts, back to toilets and urinals and other non-potable water needs.

Big game or not, the plant has been operating nonstop since opening in 1956, and even its planned $1 billion retrofit and rebuild can only be done in phases, since nothing can be shut down for construction.

And while one might think that the Super Bowl would require a boost in personnel, the wastewater facility is only slightly increasing its normally modest weekend crew, most of whom will also be viewing several big screens, but in a control room monitoring the pipes rather than the Broncos-Panthers score.

“We’ll be hearing cheering, wondering what it’s for,” Romanow said, alluding to the nearby stadium. “The team is very skilled and committed toward what we do.”

Plus, because of the lag between flush and flow, their work only really ramps up once the action on the field is done.

“By the time the game is winding down,” Romanow said,” we’ll be at full speed.”

Robert Salonga is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering crime and public safety for The Mercury News. A San Jose native, he attended UCLA and has a Master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He previously reported in Washington, D.C., Salinas and the East Bay, and is a middling triathlete. Reach him the low-tech way at 408-920-5002.

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